Humanist Habitats; Or, “Eating Well” with Thomas More’s Utopia

Abstract

One of the signal achievements of recent work on questions of embodiment in Renaissance studies has been the adoption of network-based models of description in order to approach the variety of “ensouled bodies” or “embodied souls” whose traces we encounter in Renaissance texts. Increasingly, critics deploy the figure of an “embodied” or “extended mind,” the figure of a “network,” “ecology,” or some other associative grid to distribute metaphysical singularities such as affect, agency, emotion or memory across the subject/object divide.2 Boundaries between person and environment blur. We discover that we are all “hybrids” or, as one cognitive scientist puts it, “natural-born cyborgs.”3This network-based model offers a descriptive language that appears closer to how Renaissance persons understood or experienced their own bodies as ongoing transactions with a world that possessed them as much as they strove to possess it.4 Ecology makes us more effective readers of Renaissance texts. We recognize the (now true) strangeness of the past even as that strangeness is remediated by a superior interpretive model.

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